Our solution

We believe that the fastest way to find what you are looking for on a website is by typing in a search box, and by optimizing the feedback loop around typing, we can get your visitors to the content they are looking for as quickly as possible.

Our solution involves a mixture of modern user experience and indexing server technologies.

Data Indexing

We take the human readable information from your website, breaking it up and categorizing it in a variety of ways, and then send it to our search server for indexing. To return the best results possible, Haystack support opengraph, the modern web standard for describing web pages (used by Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest).

To keep the data fresh, we watch your content using our Drupal and Wordpress modules, sending off updates to haystack as soon as your website is updated. User selections and other analytics are also batched up and sent off to our servers every 5 minutes, improving the search results over time.

Search Server

Our search server essentially blends up all of the content and serves it back in a structured way based on the words that you type. It uses a technique that is optimized for "as you type" autocomplete, returning results based on the words you haven’t finished typing yet.

The users feed the results as well. We track clicks and push this information back into the index, weighing clicked results higher for similar search phrases.

User Experience

When a user clicks in a search field, they are interested in doing one thing, searching your content. At this moment, we present them with a full page, distraction-free interface, so they can type and get instant results. On mobile, we compress our interface down so it’s perfectly usable with the virtual keyboard showing, and the user can easily scroll through results or keep typing until they find what they are looking for.

With a physical keyboard, the user can use the arrow keys to choose the correct content, as well as launching the search with a secret key command (TAB+F), which allows for an extremely fast keyboard-only navigation experience around your content.

Dive into the details

See how we stack up below or contact us@haystack.menu for more information.

DEFAULTSEARCH

HOSTEDSEARCH

haystack

Easy

Installation and configuration can be done in 5 min.

Optimized

Our search index is optimized for “as you type” searches

Responsive

Built from scratch and optimized for all screen sizes and bandwidths

Lean

Uses less data than traditional search, most communication is between the browser and our server rather than yours

Specialized

We have seperate servers dedicated to ingesting and processing data, crawling documents and search indexing